Ryan Gosling as Jacob in Crazy Stupid Love.

Photograph by: Warner Bros
, handout

By most accounts, he's a witty Canadian lad with a penchant for put-on humour.

When the assessment is passed along to the Oscar-nominated actor at a Ritz-Carlton Hotel suite, he pretends to look behind him.

"You're thinking of Ryan Reynolds," he says turning back to the reporter.

Nobody confuses the careers of the mainstream Reynolds with the indie-favourite Gosling. But the more things change, the more Gosling refuses to stay the same.

The 30-year-old was celebrated for his Academy Award-nominated portrayal of the drug-addict teacher in 2006's Half Nelson and as the lovable loser infatuated with a blow up doll in 2007's Lars and the Real Girl.

Now, he's entering the commercial zone with a series of movies that Hollywood is proud to call their own.

Gosling has signed to play the lead in the remake of the sci-fi classic, Logan's Run.

He will co-star opposite Sean Penn in the crime thriller, The Gangster Squad, and he's in the film version of The Place Beyond the Pines with Bradley Cooper.

He's also front and centre in the George Clooney-directed political drama, The Ides of March (set for release Oct. 7), which features Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti.

More immediately, Gosling is showing off his comedy shops alongside Steve Carell and Emma Stone in Crazy, Stupid, Love, which opens July 29.

Stone, who made her debut in Superbad and had her breakout in Easy A, is a big Gosling fan, too.

"He's a really good time for everyone," she says of her on-set experience. "He's a song-and-dance man. He's a real renaissance man. And he's really just open and up for anything. So he's a great teammate."

Cast and crew seem to agree that Gosling is a revelation, on camera and off.

"Well, I guess it's just because I was so boring before," he says.

Then he leans forward slightly like he's confiding secret information.

"I had finished Blue Valentine," he says of the sombre R-rated love story. "I had to go to the doctor for a physical. And when I left, he gave me a prescription and he wrote, 'Do a comedy.'"

Funny thing is, Gosling did lots of comedies when he was starting out.

Born in London, Ont., and raised in Cornwall, Ont., his first big gig at 12 was as a singer and dancer on The Mickey Mouse Club TV show with Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Keri Russell.

After two years, he moved on to the Canadian comedy series, Breaker High, and at 17, he travelled to New Zealand to film the show, Young Hercules.

He made his film debut in 2000's Remember the Titans, but established himself with his Independent Spirit Award nomination for his portrayal of the neo-Nazi in 2001's The Believer.

He dabbled in studio films after that. There was his co-starring role in Sandra Bullocks's Murder by Numbers in 2002, which didn't work for critics or fans. The weepie 2004 love story, The Notebook, alongside Toronto-based Rachel McAdams, turned out to be a hit.

He returned to his independent ways, culminating with Half Nelson in 2006.

These days, it seems Gosling is in transition, moving from independent to more commercial projects.

That's especially evident with Drive, which arrives in North American theatres in September after winning the 2011 Cannes Film Festival best director prize for Danish filmmaker, Nicolas Winding Refn.

It was Gosling who chose Refn to direct the studio action flick about a stuntman who moonlights in L.A. as a heist getaway driver.

But at their first meeting in L A. to discuss the movie, Gosling says he wasn't convinced the collaboration would pay off.

For one thing, Refn didn't have a driver's licence. Gosling was chauffeuring the director back to his hotel "after a terrible meeting," when things changed.

"I turned on the radio just to quiet the silence and REO Speedwagon's Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore came on," Gosling remembers. "And he (Refn) started singing it at the top of his lungs, and crying."

Refn told Gosling he thought that's what Drive was about, and the actor could see his point, and eventually hired the director.

So, Drive and pop music have a lot in common. "Yes, it does" Gosling says. "It's kind of like a violent John Hughes movie. Like Pretty in Pink with head smashing."

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